Current and future off-the-shelf computing memory technologies are subject to memory cell failures that can prevent memory cells from reliably storing data. The failure of just a few memory cells can result in data loss and the decommissioning of a large region of memory. Examples of memory that may have a higher rate of memory cell failure than other types of memory include phase change memory and flash memory. However, the use of these types of memory is increasing due to a desire to replace the mechanical hard drives and volatile memory in many types of electronic products.
Memory hardware can hide memory cell failures from the software layers executing on the hardware by using some hardware correction techniques. Examples of hardware corrections include cell remapping where spare cells are used to replace faulty cells and error correcting code techniques where extra cells can store redundant information and use this redundant information to re-compute the original data in case of errors in a limited number of cells. However, once the memory hardware runs out of spare cells and/or the errors exceed ability to be corrected by the redundancy of error correcting codes, then the memory system has to decommission a large region of memory. These large regions of memory are typically a memory page of the memory hardware that can be in the range of approximately one kilobyte (1K) up to two megabytes (2 MB) in size. Decommissioning an entire memory page is inefficient because the majority of memory cells on the page still work, yet the whole page cannot be used after a memory page has been decommissioned.